Bipin Joshi and the Missing Global Hindu Voice

In Bipin Joshi’s captivity, we glimpse the quiet absence of a global Hindu voice.

After two years in Hamas captivity, Bipin Joshi is finally home, and his ātmā has attained sadgati. His mortal remains were repatriated from Israel last week. At Ben Gurion Airport, the Israeli foreign ministry held a farewell ceremony attended by locals and foreign citizens; at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal’s interim Prime Minister Sushila Karki draped the national flag over his coffin and declared him “a son of Nepal, a son of every mother.” In his hometown, Kanchanpur, he was cremated with state honours, befitting a national hero. 

A student of agriculture, Joshi had been in Israel for just three weeks when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. Only 23 years old at the time, he showed immense bravery, throwing back live grenades that the terrorists had lobbed into the bomb shelter where he and other students were hiding. While 10 other Nepali citizens were killed that day, Joshi was taken to Gaza alive. 

He was the only Hindu among the 251 other hostages. Yet most Hindus around the world didn’t even know his name until last week. There were no coordinated campaigns, no institutional pressure, no mobilisation within the Hindu community to draw attention to his cause—even while the war itself made daily headlines. This is, however, not surprising given that transnational Hindu advocacy, whether centred in the Indian subcontinent or in the diaspora, is still in its infancy, and not nearly as organised as, for instance, Jewish or Islamic advocacy networks.

Bipin Joshi (photo sourced by the author).

But Joshi’s case and, more broadly, the global response to October 7, underscore the urgent need for Hindu advocacy to mature rapidly, especially in the diaspora. After the grotesque taking of the hostages on October 7, when posters calling for their release went up on the streets and campuses across North America and Europe, they were torn down just as fast. The hostages’ faces, Joshi became flashpoints for an obscene rage directed at anything that was not just remotely associated with Israel but even with being Jewish. 

Suddenly, it became controversial to even call for the release of the hostages—no matter if they were a foreign citizen or an elderly grandmother or a nine-month old infant—taken from Israel; while attacks on Jewish schools and synagogues, and antisemitic rhetoric of the sort that hadn’t been fashionable for nearly a century now, became an acceptable cost to be paid for a geopolitical conflict waged on a different continent. This was followed by a campaign of calumny against Israel, which is not uncommon in the proverbial ‘fog of war’; except that it led directly to the targeting of Jewish communities in the diaspora, and was painfully reminiscent of blood libels of the past. Then, when a Christian child went missing, local Jews were blamed for ritual murder, sparking antisemitic pogroms that wiped out entire communities; now, when a misfired Hamas rocket landed on a Gaza hospital, Israel was blamed for a war crime, and Jewish university students in Montreal and New York and Sydney had to cower on their way to class. 

Effectively overnight, Jewish communities—among the most integrated and institutionally protected minorities—across the Global North saw their status fundamentally altered by a foreign conflict in which they had limited say. And that’s not all. Even after a ceasefire came into effect, there has been no reset. Pro-Palestinian protests continue on campuses and in the streets, their rhetoric unchanged. There is no going back to October 6, 2023. 

This should serve as a case study for the Hindu diaspora. If this can happen to world Jewry —with their long-established institutions and decades of advocacy experience—what happens to communities with far less institutional support when similar dynamics activate? 

For one, Hindu advocacy groups must learn from the failures of their Jewish counterparts. For decades, the latter focused on classic antisemitism from the right: neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and institutional exclusion. They built frameworks assuming that liberal institutions would remain allies, that documenting discrimination and appealing to shared values would suffice. Post-October 7, that framework collapsed. The hostility came from progressive spaces where Jews had been welcome, and the playbook designed for far-right threats proved useless.

Jewish organisations had also ceded the narrative war on campuses. Pro-Palestinian organising spent decades successfully framing Israel through a settler-colonial lens, making anti-Israel positions progressive orthodoxy among younger generations—they kept at it even while the Palestinian cause itself lost geopolitical relevance and Israel’s international standing normalised. When October 7 occurred, the narrative infrastructure to blame Jewish communities was already built and waiting.

Most critically, Jewish communities had fallen into what might be called the “model minority trap.” In progressive spaces increasingly organised around oppressor-oppressed frameworks, visible success made Jews appear powerful. When they claimed victimhood after October 7, the response was: You're powerful, you can't really be victims. 

Hindu communities in North America face remarkably similar vulnerabilities—but with far less institutional preparation. Hindus are also a ‘model minority,’ expected to be grateful, quiet, and successful without complaint. India is increasingly framed in progressive spaces as a Hindu nationalist threat, making diaspora Hindus suspect by association. The narratives, the organised opposition, the willingness to engage in collective blame—all of that infrastructure already exists. 

This is where Hindu advocacy organisations—particularly in the diaspora—need to develop rapidly and strategically. They must fight the narrative war on campuses and in progressive spaces; build grassroots presence while also establishing institutional footholds. But organisations alone can only do that much, and, ultimately, they are only as effective as the community they advocate for. Strong diaspora institutions require a strong diaspora identity. Communities cannot defend themselves if they don't recognise themselves as communities.

This points to something Hindu communities urgently need to develop: transnational Hindu consciousness. When a Jewish hostage is taken anywhere, Jewish organisations worldwide coordinate. When Muslim communities face violence, advocacy groups mobilise across borders. There is a consciousness that transcends nationality. Hindu communities lack this almost entirely. Bipin Joshi was Nepali, and that is why his cause barely registered outside Nepali circles until the very end, even though more than one seventh of humanity is Hindu. This has to change. If Bipin Joshi’s sacrifice is to mean more than a headline, it must awaken the Hindu community to the realisation that Hindu solidarity cannot stop at national borders.

(Mayuri Mukherjee-Pascar is a Montreal-based political analyst and a PhD candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.)